Woke up at 9 with a mission. The grading session was in 3 hours, and I needed to construct a rubric. Clay and Leah, my grading session co-head-TAs, were out of commission. I grabbed some oatmeal and kadak chai and started reading through examples. Did a better job of keeping the rubric concise than I did last week. Hauled up the hill on a LimeBike to Gates and met up with Leah, who had decided not to be out of commission :P we went over the rubric. The grading session was hectic but fun. I answered a lot of questions about ambiguous submissions that didn’t fall clearly under one of the rubric items.
Went back home, decided to get a memory foam topper on amazon, went back through past research and made a call. For some reason I could get a king cheaper than a full, so I decided to do it.
Ran to the park and did some squats and leg raises, plus meditation. It was a beautiful day for the workout! Afterwards I ran towards an unexplored trail that ran along the Six Mile Creek. Somewhere along the way, I figured out how to get down to the creek directly, and spent a fun half hour hopping rocks to get upstream. There were tall slate cliffs in places along the creek–it felt like something out of Indiana Jones. Eventually arrived at a deep pool where several groups were chilling. I took off my shirt and plunged in! It wasn’t as cold as I was expecting. There was a super cool multilevel waterfall, and a couple and another fellow were hanging out by it. I approached them and watched as they jumped off ledges into a very deep section of pool right below a frothing falls. I decided to get 90% of the fun with 90% less chance of dying and just swam into the pool/climbed up to higher sections of the waterfall. It was pretty amazing. I could just sit at one very short falls and let the water jets wash over me, like some crazy natural hot tub. Will have to try to get my roommates to check it out or something…
Jogged back, stopped at AppleFest (yup!) downtown and got myself a tasty apple and an even tastier bag of piping hot apple cider donuts. Showered and ate dinner, some of my Indian food, then took a brief look at the KA homework. Then went to the country dance! It was quite fun but the dances (English country dances a la Pride and Prejudice, as opposed to “contra” dances from last time) were considerably more complicated. I was having a ton of fun, but started struggling with some of the dances and then got a bit stressed. Still working on more quickly breaking out of the “oops, messed that up” frustrated mental state. Got to dance with the contra dancing club prez, who also knew swing–I asked her to dance before the song started and she was like “sure, now? ;)” and I did a few swing moves. Met a couple cool grad students who happened to be flatmates, Hannah and Morgan. Tried to do a waltz with Hannah and then Morgan showed me how to do it properly :P Ended up getting a ride home with those two (along with a Brazilian exchange student). Fun conversation! Walked home, finished Shantaram and realized there is a recent sequel (?!). Wrote this log and hit the hay–I’m helping to run a review session tomorrow afternoon, oof. Need to start logging my TA hours to make sure I don’t do > 20 hours a week–that would not be a good prioritization.